University education often suffers from a lack of an explicit and adaptable didactic design. Students complain about the insufficient adaptability to the learners' needs. Learning content and services need to reach their audience according to their different prerequisites, needs, and different learning styles and conditions. A way to overcome such…

Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin's (1956) research on concept development is reexamined from a connectionist perspective. A neural network was constructed which associates positive and negative instances of a concept with corresponding attribute values. Results suggest the simultaneous learning of attributes guided the network in constructing a faster…

Discussion of computers as mindtools focuses on semantic networks and expert systems that help learners build a representation of what they know by designing their own knowledge bases. Describes a study of undergraduates that examined the effects of building semantic networks on the construction of expert systems. (Author/LRW)

Users of educational hypertext are faced with the challenge of creating meaning both within and between texts. Cohesion is an important factor contributing to whether a reader is able to capture meaning and comprehend text. When readers are required to fill in conceptual gaps in text, comprehension can fail if they do not have sufficient…

Describes a study of undergraduates that compared navigational study strategies, the extent of lesson coverage, and attitudes about learning with three types of hypermedia lessons to examine how learners use different types of graphical browsers in a learner-controlled hypertext system to construct personalized representations of the content…

Conceptual learning of 13 graduate students was studied during a six-week course using the Internet for collaborative learning of online articles. Five groups were formed with each creating a knowledge map during the first and fifth week of the course. Multidimensional scaling analysis was used to study change in each group's mapping over time to…

Maccia's epistemology of intelligent natural systems implies that computer systems must develop qualitative intelligence before knowledge representation and natural language understanding can be achieved. Emotion and sensation--capabilities which computers do not currently possess are vital to the growth of the mind (Stanley I. Greenspan).…